Opinion

The reason most of us Americans still plod helplessly along the same doomed course of longer hours for less wages and act like nothing is wrong is best summed up by John Steinbeck. He said, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily-embarrassed millionaires."

To fully appreciate how seriously the GOP is hampered by the dead weight of the religious right, look no further than Sunday's chat shows, where Ralph Reed and Gary Bauer did their darndest to deny reality.

The first step is to learn the facts, and then to get angry and to ask ourselves, as progressives and caring human beings, what we can do about the relentless transfer of wealth to a small group of well-positioned Americans.

The banking crisis in Cyprus is great fun and a gift to editorial cartoonists — like me! It is a story of crazy economic collapse, with Russian mobsters laundering money in secret accounts and crooked Cypriot bankers who gambled the dirty cash away on risky Greek bonds, bringing down the economy of their tiny nation.

American corporations have every right to protect their legitimate interests, and protect themselves from injustice. But so long as they wield their great power with indifference to justice, the capitalist force in America no longer deserves the kind of moral respect we gave it during the long years of the Cold War.

Rand Paul is a throwback to that old GOP mindset. He broadly argues for a full American withdrawal from Afghanistan and a serious reduction in the American military presence abroad. He contends that isolationism should be a major feature of what he calls "the new GOP."

Corporations have simply stopped paying their taxes, perhaps using the 2008 recession as an excuse to plead hardship, but then never restoring their tax obligations when business got better. The facts are indisputable.

Here's a pop quiz for Congress: If you cut food assistance for needy families by $333 million, and allow corporations to dodge $183 billion in federal taxes in the same year, how much did you end up reducing the deficit?

Essential human needs are being packaged into products to be bought and sold. The right to food and water, education, health care, public spaces, and unrestricted speech shouldn't be based on who can pay the most, or on who can generate profits with the slickest marketing pitch.